The field of the invention relates generally to generating recommendations based on a location of a potential customer, and, more specifically, to network-based methods and systems for generating a set of recommended merchants associated with an input merchant based on merchants visits associated with cardholders who previously transacted with the input merchant.
Consumers are interested in receiving recommendations for merchants to visit, and some merchants may be interested in providing recommendations of other merchants to consumers. For example, a consumer may be staying at a hotel operated by a first input merchant, and the consumer may seek recommendations for other merchants (second merchants) to visit such as restaurants or attractions. The first merchant may be unable to provide such a recommendation because the merchant or employee of the merchant that is asked for the recommendation lacks the necessary information to make such a recommendation. By way of example, the hotel may have a concierge desk or service with limited staff which makes receiving a recommendation from the concierge difficult for hotel patrons. And, in some cases, some hotels may not have a concierge service for providing such recommendations. Hotel customers at these types of hotels may have difficulty finding merchants/attractions to patronize. The hotels may wish to provide recommendations but are unable to without a concierge service. Moreover, even for those hotels that have a concierge service, the recommendations provided are usually based on the personal experience of the concierge and not on objective visit data. Accordingly, it is desirous to have a system that provides a list of recommended merchants based, in part, on transaction data of customers of the recommending merchant.